Barrage damage -- huh?

[apoc527]

Well, despite a Search and going through each thread that came up, I failed to find the helpful discussion of Barrage Damage and the table on page 75 of High Guard.

In short...huh?

It says earlier that the individual weapon dice matters, but then that doesn't seem to come up. Then the table has entries for 5, 10, 12, 20, and 50 dice barrages, but I don't see where that comes up at all in the rules. How do you get 200 damage for a 100 nuclear missile barrage doing 50% damage?

I'm just totally confused, can someone explain this to me? Thanks!

 

[apoc527]

I think I figured out where the 100 damage for the 100 nuclear missile attack comes from. On page 51, it says that a nuclear missile does 2 points of damage, so 100 nuclear missiles does 200 damage x 50% for the total barrage attack roll = 100. That makes sense. Of course, what doesn't make sense is how that penetrates huge amounts of armor.

 

[Input Jack]

FWIW, I havent been able to figure out Barrages either. I cant even find where theyre explained.

 

[Captain Brann]

Hi Barrages make no sense at all.

if you have more than 12 points of armour on a ship you will never take damage as you subtract 12+ from your to hit roll which will not let any damage through.
A large bay Particle beam can do 9d6 dam which is an average of 31dam, if you have 15 armour 16 dam would get past. Under the barrage system it is unlikely any would.

CAn anyone explain this to me??

Chris

 

[captainjack23]

It's baffling, but then I only gave it aquick look, as I'll use another system for capital ship batteles -which won't involve players as characters, anyway.

Still, it would be nice if it could have an easier explanation.

 

[Klaus Kipling]

This baffled me for a while, but I spotted this text last night:

"Add up the protection offered by the defenses, and then subtract it from the individual weapon damage score to determine the final DM."

This is p.74 of HG, first column, in the para headed Barrages & Defenses, just above the subheader Armour:.


This states, though not very clearly, that the damage dice of a single weapon of type is subtracted from the negative DM to the 2d6 barrage roll produced from adding armour and other defenses together.

This, however, is not done in the example shown.

Really this needs to be made clearer, and the terminology better defined. "Individual weapon damage score" could be misconstrued as the total barrage damage for that weapon, rather than the number of dice a weapon rolls for damage.

Therefore a 5d6 Fusion Gun will knock 5 off the DM for armour and such, for example.

This rule is well concealed in the text. It's obvious it should be there, especially as we told to explicitly record the damage dice in the notation, but even after several rereadings I only noticed it when I was having a casual read before bed. It should be bullet-pointed and made bold.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

That makes a lot more sense and helps to justify the heavier weapons.

10 weapons doing 1d6 will have a Barrage of 10 and a -1 DM to armour.

1 weapon doing 10d6 will also have a Barrage of 10, BUT, you get -10 to Armour.

 

[Kromodor]

Hello guys,

My first post here.

Resurrecting old topic of barrage. No worries, figured it out already, thanks to all your posts and few re-reads. The funny thing is I haven't tried barrage rules in a game, yet.

Anyway, they should correct the example and some of the wording. Since it is 2 years past, I highly doubt they will correct it (but secretly hope to see correction).

The example really messes this up. It should hit with effect of 7, not 5. Which brings a lot of players in the wondering zone. Why use big, expensive, bulky high tech weapons, when you can arm sh*t load of 1d6 pee shooters and obliterate the same.

Thanks to people like you, who dug out the golden-make-sense rule:

"Add up the protection offered by the defenses, and then subtract it from the individual weapon damage score to determine the final DM."

where Score should be #Dice OR explicitly said that damage score should be looked up from the "barrage weapons damage table".

 

[apoc527]

Exactly! It only took a few years to figure it out!